#146 – CLOSURE?

I call her again to say would she like me to stop by her sidewalk place and I am met with haughty disdain. The lovey-dovey charge again. And anyway, she says, the sex wasn’t that good.

And Mr. Lewis is on the phone saying he wondered why I had canceled our next appointment. Did it mean I did not want to continue with him? If that was the case, we still needed another session for “closure.”

What an awful word closure, I thought. An awful word form this limited man.

So I go in to the Jewish Board again and we talk in circles. He wants to know what I had wanted to get out of therapy. I repeat again some of the things I had discovered over the past year. I tell him again about the encounter with Mrs. Miner. I tell about my aunt and what it raised in me. And I say again that what happened with Gillian had been flattering at first and then has seemed like a run-through duplicate of what had surely happened way in the past. I tell him that in my mind now these perfect summer places are places of horror. I tell him about Lauryn.

He nods and I could swear he is thinking that all my discoveries have come through him.

“We really should continue,” he says. “I believe I can help. I have been thinking about what you said last week. That was a very angry and aggresive thing you did when you asked me if I had read Alice Miller and the ACOA literature. Your anger is something we could work on together.”

I was writing a check at the window when he came out to pick up his next client, who had been sitting forward in a chair clutching a long aluminum walking stick. Then he was leading the blind man back for their session.